Quando Intelectuais Finalmente Decidem Enxergar a Realidade: A Guerra Civil Espanhola

Todo comunista que sabe desenhar o próprio nome é chamado festivamente de intelectual. No momento em que percebe que o socialismo é barbárie, o intelectual é expurgado e amaldiçoado. A Guerra Civil Espanhola [1936-1939] foi responsável pela conversão da cegueira em lucidez de vários grandes escritores: Largo Caballero was unwilling to take orders from Moscow. After refusing to suppress other leftist groups he was forced out of office and replaced by Juan Negrín, a man willing to fulfil the Soviets’ every whim. The Republic received large amounts of military equipment from the USSR, its army was trained by Soviet advisors, and most of its key commands were held by communists. Promotion within the army became almost impossible without Communist Party membership. The Republic shipped two-thirds of Spain’s gold reserves to the USSR. Worst of all, Stalin’s NKVD secret police became active in Spain, and often murdered those who dissented from the Stalinist line. The Stalinist takeover of the Republican forces was what caused many of the idealistic writers who had given their services to the Republic to ultimately shun communism. It was his experience in Spain that caused George Orwell to develop the hatred of totalitarianism that manifested itself in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was the murder of his friend José Robles by the NKVD that set John Dos Passos on his journey away from communism and towards conservatism. And it was his Spanish ordeals that caused Arthur Koestler to record in The God That Failed his realization: that man is a reality, mankind an abstraction…that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty bourgeois sentiment…every single one of these trivial statements was incompatible with the Communist faith I held.